(no subject)
You were not acting like someone who had recently promised me terrible things while pressing my opened back to the hardwood floor with a several kiss. Instead you asked her about her weekend or reading or else you looked at the window. Instead of panicking I said nothing at all and dog-eared a page of my book repeatedly. The air was perfect and the small suburban houses were disgusting to see.
You were not looking at me, but at least the air-conditioning shrieked in the hospital room as I waited for an fMRI in the name of scientific discovery. I tried to read but could not see the words over your conversation with her, a conversation about a different book that I had read once too. By this time I was so nervous that the back of your haircut made me seasick. I talked to someone else who was writing a chapter for a textbook.
They took off my shoes, my locket, my underwire bra. Also my bobby pins, my hat, my black sweater. Magnetism carefully coiled, centered in the solar plexus. You were nowhere. In the end I lay down on a small hard bed and watched as they put a pillow under my legs andunder my head, and when they slid me into the magnet I could see you in the mirror overhead, standing in the control room and pressing the keys and switches that would open my head up to you. You put on a pair of eyeglasses, I closed my eyes.
When the noise started I thought that if I could wish for something I would wish that you would not look at my brain. I was grateful for the mind-body problem, serving as a final barrier. There were sets of three single-word stimuli, and the middle word had a double meaning. Like "muscle." Or "jar." In addition I could see her in the mirror, standing next to you.
Eventually they let me go and you didn't say anything. Maybe you were disappointed, hoping to find a pearl inside or possibly a flock of geese. Walking home I saw a leaf that split at the tip, its two perfectly normal points were meticulous and tidy-edged emerging from the same body. It looked like a double-meaning, so I took it and kept it between pages 25 and 26 of my book. These things made a sort of half-sense in the twilight.
You were not looking at me, but at least the air-conditioning shrieked in the hospital room as I waited for an fMRI in the name of scientific discovery. I tried to read but could not see the words over your conversation with her, a conversation about a different book that I had read once too. By this time I was so nervous that the back of your haircut made me seasick. I talked to someone else who was writing a chapter for a textbook.
They took off my shoes, my locket, my underwire bra. Also my bobby pins, my hat, my black sweater. Magnetism carefully coiled, centered in the solar plexus. You were nowhere. In the end I lay down on a small hard bed and watched as they put a pillow under my legs andunder my head, and when they slid me into the magnet I could see you in the mirror overhead, standing in the control room and pressing the keys and switches that would open my head up to you. You put on a pair of eyeglasses, I closed my eyes.
When the noise started I thought that if I could wish for something I would wish that you would not look at my brain. I was grateful for the mind-body problem, serving as a final barrier. There were sets of three single-word stimuli, and the middle word had a double meaning. Like "muscle." Or "jar." In addition I could see her in the mirror, standing next to you.
Eventually they let me go and you didn't say anything. Maybe you were disappointed, hoping to find a pearl inside or possibly a flock of geese. Walking home I saw a leaf that split at the tip, its two perfectly normal points were meticulous and tidy-edged emerging from the same body. It looked like a double-meaning, so I took it and kept it between pages 25 and 26 of my book. These things made a sort of half-sense in the twilight.